Moving towards the 2.0 release with monthly increments of
improvement-goodness, the KOffice team has once more honoured
its promise to bring out beta releases of KOffice until the
time is right for a release-candidate release. So, before the news of the previous
beta has had a chance to scroll off the Dot news page,
we bring you this beta with many, many improvements across
the board. Incremental as it is, we think it is a genuine
and important step towards a final release. So here it is: full
announcement and changelog.

Some highlights in the release announcements: loading of text
styles in presentations saved by OpenOffice.org is fixed, inserting an
image in a document becomes possible again and the first set of results
from the Berlin meeting
become integrated into KOffice. And, of course, plenty of bugfixes all
over! And the translation teams have been really busy, and many bugs in
the localisation support have been caught.

It's now possible to paint on mask in Krita:

It is really, really time to start helping the developers, by testing
and finding bugs, by writing documentation, by helping out with the
website or even by helping to get KOffice release ready by writing code
and fixing bugs. We intend to release the very first version of KOffice2
in a few months: so let's pull together and make this a great platform
for productivity software!

And... Next month you'll get another one!

Comments

Krita is great. Such a shame that Kbuntu cripples it due to missing support for GIF and other file formats. This is so annoying (especially because this is going on for years and multiple releases without neither any attempts to fix this nor any information on whether they plan to do so) that I'm considering switching to SuSE after years of Ubuntu just because of this single bug - as ridiculous as it seems. I don't want to compile Krita all by myself - installing scores of missing dev-packages. This is why I use a distro in the first place. They really should have managed to do this in over a year. They just don'T care I suppose. Unfortunately switching isn't that easy - especially with only a single hard-drive at-hand. Nevertheless - looking at the minimal progress in contrast to say SuSE I have the feeling I'm riding a dead horse.

I know many will perceive this as trolling, but if you love KDE, you really shouldn't run Kubuntu. Run a distro that puts out good KDE packages such as PCLinuxOS, Arch, Sabayon, Mandriva, Arch, openSUSE, etc.

First off. I don't want to offend, I really honor all the work of the developers.

But, the movie shows more the sluggish GUI of KOffice instead of the nice new features. Either the machine of the director is very old and slow or Krita really consumes a lot of calculation power while rendering in the background. Nevertheless which one is the real cause of the sluggish desktop, both are definitely not a good advertisement for KOffice ;-)

Yeah I also noticed this in the video. It could also be a capturing problem. Judging from the video alone makes it look like the krita UI is blocked, but I guess we'll have to see it in practise how well it works ;-)

I don't think he meant the slow frame rate.
The video shows (in its second halve) that the filter dialog is wrongly designed (the preview is shown but you cannot press until the complete image shows a preview of the filter). There will always be slow filters and this won't become better simply by stripping debug symbols.

Also the blur filter is extremely slow - I don't think that this can be caused by debug information.

Hi, do Krita developers have a problem to get sub-pixel precision tablet events from Qt? It worked perfectly with openSUSE 10.3, but I have never been able to get sub-pixel precision with 11.0, so it may be an X.org, linuxwacom, or Qt problem. What xorg.conf do you use?

Well... It's very much OS dependent it seems. We do some trickery to get smooth curves from tablet positions. On X11 it seems to work fairly well, though it could be better. OSX is a complete tragedy, and I haven't been able to test Windows.

At least MPEG is a published standard (ISO, even) instead of some esoteric format few people have ever heard of. There is plenty of open-source software that can play it back. It takes an extra step to install the software to play it on Fedora 10, but consider that .MP4 files (the ISO followup to the mpeg container format) require Windows Vista users to install a little extra software too. That's also a newer ISO standard format.

You can play it back with Free Software only, and it is available easily for Fedora 10 without fearing installation of malware, BigBrotherware, adware, etc. Be happy! We probably have it even better than the Windows users.

The Beta3 has no different viewstyle than the same what latest 1.x seris has.

Is there something planned to be on "View > Display Mode"?

Is there change to get a space between sheets? To top of the first sheet and around too. More like OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office. That just makes better visual understanding how does the document look when printed when the toolboxed and other panels ain't touching the sheet.

The current view could be just one style, but default should be one where there is about 20-40px space around sheet.

It took a bit more time than I thought and there was a more real life than I'd liked this month, so I was a little too late for this beta -- but right now, the Krita code in svn saves shapes. And I'm really close to loading them again. Unfortunately, editing shapes in Krita is broken at the moment. But I'm fairly certain that editing, loading and saving of shapes will work in Krita in the next beta.

You guys are doing an amazing work. KOffice has amazing potential. I hope some big companies eventually realise this and pour some money into your project and hopefully into your pockets too because you guys deserve it.

Let me help you out there. It's quite possible there was nothing really on/in his/her mind. So you see, if there was nothing on/in their mind to begin with and they spoke it, then it stands to reason that nothing was really said.

1. Interface is sluggish (not it is not the bandwidth) - at one stage it even froze, I hope this is only because it is a beta but knowing KDE based apps, I fear it will continue this way.

2. There isn't anything in the video that made me say "wow" that's nice. The free hand drawing is not the best thing to do when demoing a new product to the public especially if you want to be taken seriously by the business market.

3. I am yet to see how fast it would run when you open up high resolution images with rich colors, 3D graphics. Paint.Net and PhotoFiltre do this very well.

4. I am serious, this video reminds me so much on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxx2KcPWWZg (MS Paint parody) - Please look at it, it is quite funny and only then you will what I mean. I just cannot believe it is actually true. (It is an MS Paint Parody, trust me you will laugh)

5. It doesn't matter if it is closed source or open source software as long as it performs. Yes, Open Source IS better but I don't choose software by its license.

To add to this, I am quite impressed with KDE 4.2 (the latest) but it still needs work. I completely skipped 4.0 and 4.1 and I run from it as if it was Vista and I am waiting for 4.2 to come out. So please don't take criticism bad. You get it because someone likes and appreciates your efforts and wants you to succeed.

Try to perform a simple task:
-add a blur effect mask to a CMYK image or a 16 bit RGB image

As far as I can see Paint.NET does not have masks, color management or support for more 8 bit RGB. It's simply comparing apples and oranges.
Of course an app that does only 8 bit RGB can always be faster than an app that does a lot more.

Also note that this is still a beta, so there will be further improvements.

Well Ok but in my opinion the video should be showing a nice art work which would already be done with Krita - as in, "lets see what it can do" (just like Tux and the GIMP). Currently it is only showing a few lines drawn loosely and that is what triggered me off a bit to post the comment above. It is like using MS Paint. Show me some gradient fills, texture fills in "selected areas", image resizing, adding borders, adding transparency (just select which color to be transparent), transparant image pasting, water marks etc. I hope you have seen that YouTube video I posted.

Now in relation to Photoshop, well, we all have limits don't we? :) There are cheaper alternatives to PS, you have PhotoFiltre Studio, Paint Shop Pro but nothing beats free.

Most of the above mentioned features are already implemented in PhotoFiltre free except for the texture fills (PSP does this). Just select an area and fill it with a texture.

I have not used Krita but that's why we have demo videos so we can see the cool stuff.

The thing is, we wanted to show of _new_ stuff. Gradient fills, texture fills, image resizing, adding border, transparency -- all that stuff was already available in 1.4. Been there, done that, still got the code and the functionality.

Oh that's great then! As soon as KDE 4.2 gets released or the developers of KUbuntu, PCLinuxOS or Mandriva create a Live CD, you can be sure I'd be giving this a try. I didn't know about Krita before. It's good to see there is an alternative to the GIMP. If it really has all the stuff I mentioned and of course I believe you then this is just great! I am a C++ developer for Windows but for business software only and I am clueless when it comes to graphics and canvases etc. I use PhotoFiltre primarly when it comes to editing/drawing toolbar icons. I really to try to do some work with QT/KDE, develop some type of open source database program with MySQL support.

The video is pretty cool; it shows a really cool set of features in a short time, and in a playful way too :)
The fact that the blur-filter is added to the layer-stack is pretty darn cool. For those that didn't get it; you can add a filter and instead of applying it once, it will be remembered and any further modification to the layer will also be blurred.
Same with the invert.

I have to admit I can see the points of poster with the nick "Observer". Creating a screencast is pretty darn hard; having a voice over or some helpful text on screen. As well as having a couple of pictures prepared helps. I think the hand drawn thing is funny; but we all know that people like pretty things and this hand drawn distracts :)

That's a bit misleading. Krita always seemd to me as not supporting the baseline features very well but concentrating on fancy new stuff.

Basics as image resizing had severe bugs in stable versions and filters like unsharp mask were (are?) very slow for large kernel sizes.

Even selecting basics like "Filter"-"Adjust brightnes/contrast" makes the interface freeze for several seconds. (Krita 1.6.3). Filter preview also takes very long. And that's with a simple Canon 5D JPEG. I don't want to know how slow it will be with 16bit/channel images.

My recommendation:
If you want that people use krita (and some of them to become developers) then make sure that the basic functionality works extremely well.
If the basic functionality does not work well, everyone will use gimp, Digikam, Bibble, etc.

I really like the look and feel of the new KOffice in comparison to OpenOffice, and I would like to give KWord a try, but there is a big obstacle for me:
For my profession I have to insert lots of special characters, partly even not implemented in Unicode.
In most cases I can use the keyboard - in fact, this is the main practical reason for me to use Linux -, but sometimes I need the pop-up, and I must be able to select some definite signs form definite fonts.
And the solution of KWord is quite horrable, the window shows signs form different fonts, and it took me ten minutes to find a special character, in some cases I would have to click me through three pull-down menues and after that scroll down to the sign needed.
The search field is useless: I don't know from which font the signs displayed come from - and if can type the sign for search, I don't need the pop-up anyway, because I can type it in the document.

Is there any possibility to switch the special character view to something like in M$ Word or OOo?

I don't follow your usecase; for most people the new font finder is a definite win as being able to type 'euro' or 'pound' to get that glyph is very useful.
Knowing where in the code tables your wanted glyphs is, as required by the previous dialog, is not so useful. (who knows that the euro is in table 31!)

So, while I understand you don't like our change, I'm afraid your usecase seems quite special and we have to accept that one solution doesn't work for everyone.

Naturally you can create or ask others to create a docker-plugin using the koffice plugin structure to do exactly what you want. Its quite trivial to do, actually ;)
Find me on #koffice if you want to find out how to do this. A good start is at http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/KOffice_Overview (topic Dockers specifically)